Q-and-A with Lamar coach Pat Knight

This has nothing to do with Bob Knight. Or Lamar recruits. Or Bob Knight talking to Lamar recruits.

This is all Lamar basketball.

And Pat Knight talking about Lamar basketball.

It’s his team, after all.

Here’s what he said about his team, which started practices Friday:

How are practices going?

Things are going good. What really helped us was the Canada trip. So instead of it being like your first practice and having to put in your offense, your defense and all your rules and everything, the Canadian deal really helped us. Having eight regular practices plus the three games, that really helped us there. Putting in everything, all your basic ground work. And then when we came back to school, or school was about to start, we went right into individual workouts after that so we could work on all the stuff we put in from a breakdown standpoint, two-on-two and everything. So it’s really helped us.

So really our first practice was like a carryover from what we’ve been doing. That trip was huge for us. So instead of me at the first practice saying, ‘Alright, this is what we want. Here’s all our defensive rules.’ Taking time, boom, boom, boom. ‘Here’s our offense.’ It’s kind of like we’re two to three weeks ahead instead of taking all that time. They know everything that we want. Now it’s fine-tuning and adding to it. They have the basis.

It’s been good for me as a first-year coach here with this team. We had that Canadian trip, or yeah, we’d probably be practicing longer, or I’d be doing more talking and putting stuff in. It’s been nice. It’s kind of like we’re just going with the flow from wherever we left off.

You talked before the Canadian trip about putting a focus on defense in those practices and on that trip. What’s your focus now in these first couple weeks of practice?

Defense. … Defense. … Now it’s all your defensive rules. Now we’ve got to work on how we double-down in the post, how we play that. Get through screens. How we’re going to guard the ball screen. Now, instead of the basics — the stance, being in the passing lane, where we want you on help — now you kind of really harp on the game situations. You know, when the ball goes in the post. The ball screen situation and everything. Now we get more details out but we’re still focused on the defense.

We’ve got to be able to defend. You know, our offense is going to score enough to win. All you’ve got to do is score one more bucket than the other guy. But we’ve got to stop guys. They’ve got to start taking pride in it. Then they’ve got to realize too they’ve got to score from their defense. It’s not just playing defense. If you’re playing defense, you’re going to get fastbreaks, you’re going to get the dunks, what the kids like to do in the fastbreak situations. That comes from the defense.

That’s something coach (Billy) Tubbs didn’t get enough credit for. Everyone talks, ‘Yeah, he pushed the ball.’ Yeah, a lot of those pushes were coming from steals, guys being the passing lanes and guys guarding the ball. We’d kind of like to get back to that, to where coach Tubbs did things from that standpoint. Just having a lot of pressure, making teams uncomfortable. Our whole thing, if we go a couple hours, we probably go an hour and a half on the defense and just a half hour on the offense.

Between the end of the Canadian trip, I guess in mid-August, until now, in October, how much have the guys retained? Are you pleased with what they retained?

Yeah, I was surprised with how much they retained. It’s hard with a new staff coming in because everything is different. The language — what you call different things, what you call fastbreak, what you call a screen — the language is different. I think they’ve kept it up pretty good. I was surprised.

And actually I told them, ‘You guys actually have good basketball sense. You’re not dumb. You’re smart kids when it comes to knowing the rules and everything.’ So that’s been really pleasing. We haven’t really had to repeat ourselves or go over things. So when they make a mistake, we tell them about it but they know why.

For instance, if they’re not on the help line, you know, ‘Hey, you had to be…’ ‘Yeah, I know coach. I should have been right there.’ So they’re getting it. But you know, we’ve got to keep harping and coaching up on them. I’m really pleased with how much they’ve retained and how much basketball knowledge they really have.

Is there anything they need in terms of confidence? The last few years, they haven’t made the conference tournament. You’re kind of taking over a team that hasn’t had a ton of success.

Yeah, confidence is a problem. We’ve got to be careful too with the way we address things and get on them. I think we’re dealing with some frail personalities from that standpoint. Winning the three games up in Canada helped a lot of things. Winning cures. But also confidence in playing and practice and how things go.

We scrimmage every third day, so that gives us two game-like situations a week to work on their confidence. I think you’re right. They’re kind of frail because they haven’t won in three years. That just wears you out and beats on us. We’ve got to be careful as coaches to not beat them down and getting them going. To me that’s more an offensive deal because if there’s confidence, I think that comes with offense.

On defense, that doesn’t happen. I think you can still get on them as hard as you want on defense. That’s all effort. So I think we can be really aggressive with them from a defensive standpoint, but then you’ve got to be careful on offense. I don’t want guys looking over at the bench every time they throw the ball away or miss-a-shot kind of deal. But it was neat from a standpoint, you know — you want teams to have a swagger with confidence, and they got that up in Canada. So it was kind of nice. It was big.

Anthony Miles and Charlie Harper are the only guys that have been here four years. What are you looking for our of them considering the time they’ve been here?

Actually, all six seniors — just because they’re seniors, even though some of them have been here only one year — you’re a senior to me and you’re a senior because you’ve earned it even if you’ve been here one year. You have the title. So all six of them have a lot of responsibility.

To me, to be good, seniors have to play like seniors. That means not just on the court, but off the court, in the classroom and we’re going to put a lot of emphasis on them. When things go wrong or go good they’ll get the credit or they’ll feel our wrath a little bit because they’re the leaders. It’s their last chance at a winner. It’s just how it was when I played. Even guys that don’t play a whole lot. You’re a senior. You still have got to be a leader in practice in the locker room or off the court. All six of those guys have pressure from us to be an extension of the coaching staff.

What more do you want to see between now and that first game, that first exhibition game (Nov. 1 vs. St. Gregory’s)?

Keep working on the defense. Just getting better. Then on offense, we’ve still got to get better shot selection. Drive the ball more. You’ve got to improve in everything. I like where they’re going. They’re work ethic has been good. We’ve got to jell more as a unit. Keep coming closer as a team. There’s more work to do. But I think we are ahead of schedule.